If I had one regret about my AM1 review that posted a few weeks ago, it was that I used a pretty hefty (relatively speaking) 500 watt power supply for a part that is listed at a 25 watt TDP. Power supplies really do not hit their efficiency numbers until they are at least under 50% load. Even the most efficient 500 watt power supply is going to inflate the consumption numbers of these diminutive parts that we are currently testing.

Keep it simple... keep it efficient.

Ryan had sent along a 60 watt notebook power supply with an ATX cable adapter at around the same time as I started testing on the AMD Athlon 5350 and Asus AM1I-A. I was somewhat roped into running that previously mentioned 500 watt power supply due to comparative reasons. I was using a 100 watt TDP A10-6790 APU with a pretty loaded Gigabyte A88X based ITX motherboard. That combination would have likely fried the 60 watt (12v x 5A) notebook power supply under load.

Now that I had a little extra time on my hands, I was able to finally get around to seeing exactly how efficient this little number could get. I swapped the old WD Green 1 TB drive for a new Samsung 840 EVO 500 GB SSD. I removed the BD-ROM drive completely from the equation as well. Neither of those parts uses a lot of wattage, but I am pushing this combination to go as low as I possibly can.

The results are pretty interesting. At idle we see the 60 watt supply (sans spinning drive and BD-ROM) hitting 12 watts as measured from the wall. The 500 watt power supply and those extra pieces added another 11 watts of draw. At load we see a somewhat similar numbers, but not nearly as dramatic as at idle. The 60 watt system is drawing 29 watts while the 500 watt system is at 37 watts.

So how do you get from a 60 watt notebook power adapter to ATX standard? This is the brains behind the operation.

The numbers for both power supplies are both good, but we do see that we get a nice jump in efficiency from using the smaller unit and a SSD instead of a spinning drive. Either way, the Athlon 5350 and AMD AM1 infrastructure sip power as compared to most desktop processors.

When building a budget system for yourself or someone else that either does not need a powerful CPU or is better served with a powerful GPU then AMD is really the manufacturer you should be looking to. The ASUS A88X-Pro, for ~$125, could serve as a solid backbone for your system with a pair of PCIe 16x 3.0 ports along with a single 4x, a pair of 1x and even two legacy PCI slots for your older hardware. The storage system can support six SATA 6Gbps ports and an additional pair of eSATA along with a half dozen USB 3.0 ports and an impressive 10 USB 2.0 ports. As the board is intended for use with an APU it sports D-Sub, HDMI, DisplayPort and DVI-D out but for gaming you are best served picking up a discrete GPU. [H]ard|OCP found overclocking to be a bit challenging as not upping the voltage enough sometimes caused drive corruption but for those willing to put in the effort a speed of 4.5GHz @ 1.575v is certainly achievable. See the full performance review right here.

"It’s important to take a step back once in awhile and remember that not everyone can afford huge multi-GPU rigs and eight core CPUs. If you are in the market for a shiny new APU, you won’t want to miss our coverage of the ASUS A88X-Pro. This new FM2+ socket motherboard may not be the answer for you, but it could surely be a solution."

AMD has been taking PC gaming very seriously, especially over the last couple of years. While they have a dominant presence in the console space, with only IBM in opposition, I believe that direct licensing revenue was not their main goal, rather that they hope to see benefits carry over to the PC and maybe mobile spaces, eventually. In the PC space, Never Settle launched as a very successful marketing campaign. While it had a stutter with the launch of the R9 (and R7) product lines, it is back and is still called, "Never Settle Forever".

Keeping with Forever's alteration to the Never Settle formula, the type of card that you purchase yields a Gold, Silver, or Bronze reward. Gold (the R9 280 and R9 290 series, and the R9 295X2) gets three free games in the Gold tier, Silver (R9 270 and R7 260 series) gets two in the Silver tier, and Bronze (R7 250 and R7 240 series) gets one free game in the Bronze tier. By and large, the tiers are the same as last time plus a few old games and one upcoming Square Enix release: Murdered: Soul Suspect. They have also made deals with certain independent developers, where two indie titles bundled together count as one choice.

The complete breakdown of games is as follows:

Gold

(Choose 3)

Silver

(Choose 2)

Bronze

(Choose 1)

Murdered: Soul Suspect (June 3, 2014)

Yes

Yes

No

Thief

Yes

Yes

No

Tomb Raider

Yes

Yes

No

Hitman: Absolution

Yes

Yes

No

Sleeping Dogs

Yes

Yes

No

Dungeon Siege III

Yes

Yes

Yes

Dirt 3

Yes

Yes

Yes

Alan Wake

Yes

Yes

Yes

Darksiders

Yes

Yes

Yes

Darksiders II

Yes

Yes

Yes

Company of Heroes 2

Yes

Yes

Yes

Total War: Shogun 2

Yes

Yes

Yes

Titan Quest (Gold Edition)

Yes

Yes

Yes

Supreme Commander (Gold Edition)

Yes

Yes

Yes

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Yes

Yes

No

Payday 2

Yes

Yes

No

Just Cause 2

Yes

Yes

Yes

Banner Saga + Mutant Blobs Attack (indie combo)

Yes

Yes

Yes

Guacamelee + DYAD (indie combo)

Yes

Yes

Yes

Mutant Blobs Attack + DYAD (indie combo)

Yes

Yes

Yes

Banner Saga + DYAD (indie combo)

Yes

Yes

Yes

Mutant Blobs Attack + Guacamelee (indie combo)

Yes

Yes

Yes

Oddly enough, there does not seem to be a Banner Saga + Guacamelee combo...

... the only impossible combination.

AMD has also announced that Never Settle will continue for more "additions" in 2014. Which ones? Who knows. It is clear that they have a great working relationship with Square Enix Europe, including basically their last six major titles in Never Settle and keeping them there, but there is not really anything from them on the horizon (at least, not announced). AMD does sound confident in having other deals lined up this year, however.

There is some regional variance in game availability, however. Read up before you purchase (especially if you live in Japan). You should be fine if you live in North America, Europe, Middle East, Africa, New Zealand, Australia, and Latin America, though, at least where AMD products are available. Still, it is a good idea to check.

AM1 Walks New Ground

After Josh's initial review of the AMD AM1 Platform and the Athlon 5350, we received a few requests to look at gaming performance with a discrete GPU installed. Even though this platform isn't being aimed at gamers looking to play demanding titles, we started to investigate this setup anyway.

While Josh liked the ASUS AM1I-A Mini ITX motherboard he used in his review, with only a x1 PCI-E slot it would be less than ideal for this situation.

Luckily we had the Gigabyte AM1M-S2H Micro ATX motherboard, which features a full length PCI-E x16 slot, as well as 2 x1 slots.

Don't be mistaken by the shape of the slot though, the AM1 chipset still only offers 4 lanes of PCI-Express 2.0. This, of course, means that the graphics card will not be running at full bandwidth. However, having the physical x16 slot makes it a lot easier to physically connect a discrete GPU, without having to worry about those ribbon cables that miners use.

Competition is a Great Thing

While doing some testing with the AMD Athlon 5350 Kabini APU to determine it's flexibility as a low cost gaming platform, we decided to run a handful of tests to measure something else that is getting a lot of attention right now: AMD Mantle and NVIDIA's 337.50 driver.

Earlier this week I posted a story that looked at performance scaling of NVIDIA's new 337.50 beta driver compared to the previous 335.23 WHQL. The goal was to assess the DX11 efficiency improvements that the company stated it had been working on and implemented into this latest beta driver offering. In the end, we found some instances where games scaled by as much as 35% and 26% but other cases where there was little to no gain with the new driver. We looked at both single GPU and multi-GPU scenarios on mostly high end CPU hardware though.

Earlier in April I posted an article looking at Mantle, AMD's answer to a lower level API that is unique to its ecosystem, and how it scaled on various pieces of hardware on Battlefield 4. This was the first major game to implement Mantle and it remains the biggest name in the field. While we definitely saw some improvements in gaming experiences with Mantle there was work to be done when it comes to multi-GPU scaling and frame pacing.

Both parties in this debate were showing promise but obviously both were far from perfect.

In the green trunks is the ASUS GTX 780 Ti DirectCU II OC which [H]ard|OCP overclocked to the point they saw in game performance of 1211MHz GPU and 7.2GHz on the memory. In the red trunks we find Gigabyte's R9 290X 4GB OC weighing in at 1115MHz and 5.08GHz for the GPU and memory respectively. Both cards have been pushed beyond the factory overclock that they came with and will fight head to head in such events as Battling the Field, Raiding the Tomb and counting to three twice, once in a Crysis and again in a Far Cry from safety. Who will triumph? Will the battle be one sided or will the contenders trade top spot depending on the challenge? Get the full coverage at [H]ard|OCP!

"Today we look at the GIGABYTE R9 290X 4GB OC and ASUS GeForce GTX 780 Ti DirectCU II OC video cards. Each of these video cards features a custom cooling system, and a factory overclock. We will push the overclock farther and put these two video cards head-to-head for a high-end performance comparison."

Next Wednesday we will get our first look at the HSA enabled Opteron X Series, otherwise known as Berlin. AMD will be unveiling the processor at the Red Hat Summit in San Francisco with an X2100 Opteron running on a Linux environment that is based on the Fedora Project. We have very recently had a chance to see the desktop equivalent, Kaveri, in action but this will be the first example of AMD's heterogeneous computing on a server. Keep your eyes peeled for our coverage, in the mean time you can get a preview at The Register.

"AMD will give the first public demo of its second-generation Opteron X-Series server processor, code-named "Berlin", at the Red Hat Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday."

A popular question that has arisen from the release of the four new low cost Kabini processors has been their effectiveness in powering a Steam Machine. Phoronix have just finished testing the new Athlon and Sempron chips, paired with several laptop IGPs using Catalyst Linux driver fglrx 13.35.5/OpenGL 4.3.12798 on Ubuntu 14.04. They tested Counter-Strike: Source, Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, and Portal at a variety of resolutions to see just how much performance these chips offer. None of the chips could offer acceptable performance at 1080p and only Portal was delivered at 60fps assuming you used 1024x768. They will be following this review with another that will pair discreet GPUs with Kabini which should increase gaming capabilities greatly.

"Earlier today the latest installment of our extensive Linux testing of AMD's new Athlon AM1 APUs were shared in the form of RadeonSI vs. Gallium3D benchmarks of the Radeon R3 Graphics found with these new entry-level APUs. Not included with that open-source vs. closed-source driver testing was any Source Engine / Steam Linux game testing due to an XCB DRI3 issue, but this article is devoted to looking at the Catalyst performance for the Sempron 2650, Sempron 3850, Athlon 5150, and Athlon 5350 to see whether any of these APUs can make the cut for a budget Steam Machine."